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Death of the football programme? Not any day soon

I think the matchday programme is gonna be around for a long time yet. There’s more collectors than ever with all sorts of collecting themes, it’s easier than ever to add to your collection, primarily through internet auction sites and it’s relatively cheap. A matchday programme bought outside the ground can cost approx £3-£5, within a few weeks that price is considerably less when listed for sale on on eBay.

You may get some of the bigger premiership clubs experimenting with different formats and maybe reducing the print run of the actual programme, putting the price up compensating the customer er sorry supporter with exclusive content and promoting it as a ‘premium product’.

As for airplane style seats in football stadiums with interactive screens for you to view it’s all very tomorrow’s world and must surely be at a few decades off. But like they say ‘we have the technology’ but we’re gonna be looking at the next generation of stadiums once the likes of the the New Wembley, the Emirates et al have out-lived their usefulness.

So, if the football programme is to survive at the top level, it must adapt and it seems London-based clubs are leading the way. Arsenal was one of the first to break the mould. The club now offers a downloadable PDF file of the match day programme free of charge, effectively admitting the current match day programme model is not sustainable in print form.

He said: “It’s not inconceivable in the future you will have a screen in the back of seat in front of you, in a similar vein to plane, where you get all the team news etc in a magazine format.”